5 Aspects of a Successful Website Accessibility Audit for Your Hospitality Business

An optimized UX interface through a carefully steered website accessibility audit has pretty much become a standard for every hospitality business. Considering the effects of the pandemic and the prevalence of digitalization today, a seamless UX experience has now become a part of a holistic rewarding customer experience.

Conducting an ADA website compliance audit for your hospitality business website covers multiple facets of your business and branding. Apart from tapping onto the disable population customer base, it also reflects care on your business ends while addressing issues that other brands might be overlooking. It shows that your business cares for the 26 percent of the population living with disability.  

When it comes to conducting a website accessibility audit, many business owners and even web developers might get confused as what to focus on. In the simplest sense, your website must be easy to navigate, operate, interact and consumable by the users. Website accessibility can have many aspects but applying everything might not be practical or beneficial for your business. In this blog, we will be discussing the five most basic yet crucial aspects of website accessibility that every hospitality business must consider.

1. A PROPER CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

You can find a plethora of options for choosing a content management system. Some of the popular options include Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, Shopify, among others. After deciding on one that fits your requirements, ensure to select a theme/template that is accessible. Your choice of theme will affect your selection of modules, plugins, widgets and more. For other elements like editing toolbars, video players, your choice of CMS must offer accessibility for those as well. For instance, include options for headings and accessible tables for editing toolbars. For video players, there should be an option for closed captioning. The admin options included in your CMS system must be accessible as well.

2. COLOR WITH CARE

A well-balanced color contrast for your online business can make a remarkable difference for website accessibility. Red-green color deficiency is one of the most common visual disabilities and color impairedness. With 8 percent of the caucasian population being affected by the aforementioned color blindness, including asterisk, a question mark, online gradient generators and color analyzers are some of the effective tools to distinguish color blocks within the content. Apart from this, keep in mind the font size and color combinations for easy readability. Avoid using Javascript or CSS features that might prevent your users from enhancing the contrast.

3. IMAGES WITH ALT TEXT

Alt text for images is beneficial for percentage of your website visitors and users who might be blind. Visual elements like images can be a huge barrier for blind users and people with low vision problems. Describe your images with complete clarity and detail. For brief descriptions, use alt attribute and for lengthy descriptions, add a “Longdesc Tag”.

4. ADD KEYBOARD NAVIGATION

Navigation can be quite a challenge for blind and visually impaired people. Using a mouse can be daunting for such users, therefore, adding a keyboard navigation can improve access of your website for such users. Make sure that disabled users can access all the elemnts of your website incuding:

 ● Anchor text

● Forms

● Widgets

● Dialog boxes

● CTAs

● URLs

● Drop-down menus

 5. DESCRIPTIVE URLS

Screen readers can pick up descriptive URLs easily, thus, making the comprehension of the webpage details easy for its user. Adding descriptive and meaningful text for your URLs also makes it easier for the users to skip right to the point of your content. For instance, while writing the URL for your ‘About’ page, here’s how to ensure good readability:

 ➔ www.123resorts.com/about- Low Score

➔ www.123resorts.com/about-our-company- High Score

Its better to avoid anchor texts like “Know more” or “Click here” for a successful website accessibility. In addition to this, avoid using images that are unable to support Alt text.

There are many other types of dynamic content that the screen readers your users might use will be difficult to interpret or might not even be aware. This includes pop-ups, model dialogs, overlays, lightboxes and more. If your website includes a slideshow, make sure that every image is supported by an alt text that can be navigated via keyboard. Its important for content creators, web developers and even website owners to take time to know its userbase and learn what will make their website more accessible to them while avoiding lawsuits. Choosing a reliable expert can make all the difference. If you would like to know what works for your ADA website compliance audit, connect with Access Design Studio today for a free assessment.